ABSTRACT
Globally and historically, breastfeeding has been initiated and sustained without medical intervention. Commercial and medical models of feeding, in collusion, came to dominate as twentieth-century hospital practices extended into the home. Apple shows how the scientification of breastfeeding and its substitute increasingly created cultural beliefs such as unreliable milk supply (Apple 1987). Marchant points to breastfeeding as an area in which it has been felt that midwives’ advice may be influenced by their own experiences. So ‘[t]he legacy of misinformation that we all carry with us from our own earlier education’ is acknowledged as ‘still there in the health service psyche’ (Renfrew 2004:4). This suggests an urgent need for science to displace old tales now culturally embedded. However, Battersby suggests the impossibility of eradicating sources other than researchbased understanding since midwives gain their knowledge of breastfeeding from a variety of sources (Battersby 2002). Some of the data collected during a training needs analysis undertaken from the Mother and Infant Research Unit in the University of Leeds between 1999 and 2001 contained material which suggests the need for an alternative to eradicating learning outside the clinical or academic setting.
